Word: role
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MCGEORGE Bundy haunted Harvard last week, bringing back with him a conception of society and man's role in it that has recently come to be discredited around here. His argument, astringent and eloquent was, despite weaknesses, ultimately reassuring...
...matters. The government must take autonomous action in the public interest which can then be justified to a sluggish populace in terms of the government's general authority to act. This is why Bundy put so much emphasis on the need to educate the public to accept a wider role for the government. The people must be like passengers in a bus who give the driver authority to take them by any route he chooses to a chosen destination...
...Industrial State, described by John Kenneth Galbraith, the government already has an extensive role in society but it is as a partner of the large corporations that make up the industrial system. Thus, for example if America's present dependence on weapons spending is to be reduced, more than a rational decision by some leader will be needed...
...thus responds by talking of de-centralization of authority as a means of making the government accountable to the people. Bundy's contrary position, insisting on a wider role for government, would be less valid if the radical view consisted of more than slogans that sound instinctively right. We are justified in asking for more concrete and practical proposals from the left to deal with the problems of complex, technological society...
...distinctly non-Marxist (not to say anti-Marxist) direction were more to the point. For it was precisely a serious explanation of such developments in American intellectual life which I sought in my questioning. The Marxist approach stresses social conflict, the primacy of economic life and the role of the common man in the workings of society and in social change. What in American society and in the social position of American intellectuals can account for the short shrift which such an immensely valuable approach has received, especially in recent decades, from American thinkers? It does not follow automatically...